


The Dying Light

by mortalitasi



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 15:00:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2196204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anders wonders how many more times the Maker can prove to him that his past is intent on catching up with him (no matter where he goes) until He stops finding it funny. </p><p>Hopefully, this'll be the last.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dying Light

“You alright?”

Anders blinks, distracted from his trailing thoughts by Isabela’s voice. He looks up at the Rivaini woman sitting on the cot across the space he’s standing in. How long has he been standing? Since the morning, he’d wager.

He doesn’t really remember taking a break. Probably forgot to, like he usually does. Hawke doesn’t come around often, only when someone in her group requests aid from the clinic—it’s often Isabela or Varric that does as such, and Hawke always stands off to the side when they visit him, arms crossed and her solemn face drawn in what is almost a pained expression. He’s not sure which one of them hates him most, her, or Fenris. At least she never brings  _him_  along when the clinic is on her list of places to stop by. Anders can credit her with  _that_ much sense.

And he needs to clean the surgery table, he thinks. There’s already an excess of dried blood crusted around the draining hole in its center.

“Anders,” Isabela says in a sing-song voice, and he realizes he’s been distracted again. “You’re doing the ‘staring into space, can’t see anything around me, I’m so very broody’ thing again.”

“Sorry,” he replies with a halfhearted smile. “Force of habit.”

“Are you done yet?” Hawke asks snappishly from where she’s standing, her ghost-grey eyes bright and very, very unhappy. “We don’t have all day to dally around while you flirt.”

“Have you  _heard_ yourself around lean, dark, and grumpy? You sound like a two-bit Nevarran paperback romance,” Isabela quips without missing a beat, and Aisling’s only reply is a roll of those eerie eyes. “ _Anyway_. I will see you shortly. Drinks on me this evening?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

Again the hollow, forced sort of smile he’s gotten used to putting on for others—maybe if he does it enough, it’ll start feeling like second nature, and he’ll somehow go back to the way he was before.

He’s been hoping that for a while now, but hope dies last, doesn’t it? He wraps the poultices he promised Isabela in a square of linen and hands them over to her, feeling his wrists ache. Too much writing, he presumes. He doesn’t even know why he tries spending time on changing Hawke’s mind. Aisling is like dwarven architecture about some things: implacable, unyielding, and no stranger to violent opposition. She’s never crumbled, not once, throughout all the arguments they manage to have between glaring at each other and working in grudging coordination. That, if not anything else, he has to admire.

No one looks up when the door to the clinic swings open on rusty hinges, creaking loud enough to be heard over the thundering of the winter storm outside. It’s one person, in a heavy cloak that may have once been a royal blue—the ends are so frayed and faded that it’s a wonder anything above the hem hasn’t fallen apart.

He only has time to see that there’s a line of raindrops collected on the rim of the cloak’s cowl, and a suspicion of the face beneath, but Isabela stands and blocks his view. They’ll come to him, he knows. _No one_  comes here without knowing what they want. It’s late besides, so this will probably be the last person he’ll see today.

Anders turns his back to rearrange supplies over the gap left by the poultices he just gave away, but the things in his grasp fall away when he hears someone speak behind him.

“Is the mage they call Anders here?”

He turns again, stricken, his heart racing in his chest, the blood roaring in his ears. He must have heard wrong. No. It can’t be.

Varric stands to the side, hefting Bianca on his back and lifting a hand. “Right over there,” he says helpfully, and then, too late, catches the look on Anders’ face.

The stranger lifts two gloved hands and pushes the hood back from their face—from her face. It settles around her shoulders with a soft rustle of wet linen, revealing lovely features, familiar features, features he thought he’d never see again: all from the soft mouth to the characteristic brows, the gentle curve of the jaw and the  _eyes_.

It’s those he’s remembered all this time, the ones he’d picture over and over as he ran the idea of going back to her through his mind, but he couldn’t have—he shouldn’t have, not after what he’d done. It had taken him half of the boat trip out to Gwaren to convince himself that she was better off without him. In her absence, these long years in Kirkwall, it had been almost possible to believe… but now she’s here, standing opposite him looking for all intents and purposes like the young woman he’d first met in the Wending Wood what seems to be a lifetime ago. He’d been another person, then, more hotheaded boy than world-weary traveler. Remembering him is pain.

“I had no way of knowing if it was you or not,” she says quietly, and the low light of the clinic catches on her golden earrings. He stops breathing, for a moment, when he sees it. She still wears charms and beads in her hair, still… “But then they mentioned something about the healer in the slums being a former Warden and—I was certain.”

She doesn’t seem to know what to say beyond that, and he keeps his distance, frozen, not even sure he has a voice any longer. Hawke and her company are silent, too, standing to the side as though they’re waiting for something to happen. He doesn’t look at Hawke’s face. He’s not sure he could handle the expression there, no matter what it may be. Anders doesn’t spare the other two a glance either. He can’t look away from her. He’s imagined what would happen if they met again, many times, so many that it has irritated Justice before, enough to lose him nights of somewhat restful sleep, enough to earn him more gaps in waking memory.

They stare at each other for a while longer. His heart hasn’t quietened.

“Merciful Andraste, Anders,” the woman exclaims at last. “Say  _something_. Anything!”

He starts at the steel in her words.  Anger. Of course.

“What are you doing here?” he says, and it comes out in a croak.

“What am I  _doing_ here?” she repeats with force enough to make him wince. “Was I supposed to sit back and—and wait and agonize while you— _ran off_  and… walked out on everything? What made you think you were in any way equipped to make that decision for me?”

Now a spark of heat jumps to life inside him too.

“I did it to protect you!” he all but shouts, the truth of it turning his voice hoarse with emotion. He’d forgotten how this felt, saying something and having her understand another. It’s the same way with Hawke, with the one discerning dissimilarity that he doesn’t bloody care for Hawke.  _She_  is different, and her misinterpretations hurt now as much as they ever had in Amaranthine. He’d been consumed by the desire to make her  _comprehend_ , even then, to make her look at things through his eyes, and she’d turned his every theory on its head.

That’s what they always did best: missing each other at every point, then patching up the empty spaces in the settling dust of the aftermath.

“Oh, please. We both know that’s a crock of shite. You couldn’t stand to face me, so you  _left_  instead,” she shoots back. When she takes a step forward the tattered cloak flutters around her feet like the too-fast beating of a moth’s wings. He knows it’s no wind that is carrying and flaring the fabric about her—it’s mana, untamed and escaping. She never did have a good hold on her magic when she was angry. That makes two of them, now.

“I couldn’t go back,” he insists, not moving when she comes to stand closer. She smells of fresh rain and sea salt, like a tossing storm. “Not after what happened.”

“I had to hear about everything from your superior officers,” she says. Tears gather in her eyes, catch on the thick brush of her white lashes. “They said you went mad, that you were possessed—that you _murdered_ them all—it took days… to gather the remains…”

Hearing her recount the prelude of his flight from Amaranthine, however briefly, makes bile rise to the back of his throat. He doesn’t even care that Hawke is here to see it all. He only wants to tell her he had no other choice, that he would have taken her with him if he’d thought he could, that he wants to make it right, if only to never have to watch her weep on his account again. She’s only done so once, and the experience is something he does not want to repeat, even if it means agony beyond measure. But he can’t reassure her. He is what she says he is, whatever the Wardens told her he is. He wonders how the Commander of the Grey took the news of his escape.

“It’s true,” he manages past the knot in his throat. “I am all that. And more. Can you see why I couldn’t—why I  _wouldn’t_  have made you leave with me?”

“You only had to ask,” she replies, sounding so broken and so very small that it drives a lance of aching longing to gather her in his arms through him. He doesn’t move. “You only had to ask. I would have done— _anything…_ ”

“I know,” Anders admits. “Which is why I didn’t.”

She lowers her gaze, too proud to let him see her cry, a half-strangled sob leaving her. The curtain of her white hair falls all around her, coming loose from its makeshift braid. Strands of it brush the buckles on his cloak. Maker, she’s so close. He wants to touch her. To make sure she’s real, after all this time.

“Una…”

The sound of her name makes the proud line of her shoulders shake beneath the heavy weight of her cloak, but still she remains apart from him, head bent, the only audible sign of her sorrow the slight clink of the charms on her jewelry that jolt as she lets the tears make their course. He shifts uncomfortably, from one foot to another, suddenly feeling too heavy, too unclean.

Isabela’s voice is both a welcome distraction and a frustrating interruption. “I take it you two know each other?”

He looks at her over Una’s shoulder with a strange mixture of relief and desperation, trying to convey everything he wants to say in one glance. He knows Isabela is no stranger to tumult and unhappiness. He has a creeping suspicion that she’d understand all too well.

“You could say that,” he allows, unable to express how very inadequate that is in describing what he exactly feels.

“We should probably… get going,” Varric says awkwardly. “You gonna be alright, Blondie?”

Anders’ eyes cut to Una, his expression crumpling. Half of him wants to beg his friends to stay, but the other knows this is something he needs to do alone, without Hawke glaring at him judgmentally.

“I’ll be fine,” he says with such convincing fake confidence that he curses himself for it. He only watches while Hawke leads her group out the clinic door, and gets a momentary glimpse of Varric turning to check on him before Hawke lets go of the door and it swings shut. Now they’re alone, and he doesn’t know what to do. He moves his attention back to her, still standing there with the back of her wrist pressed to her eyes, unmoving except for the occasional tremble that sends the beads braided through her hair clacking.

It takes him a good half a minute to build up the courage to reach out a hand and part the loose plaits from her face, and when his fingers make contact she freezes like she’s been touched by a spell of ice, but he forces himself to go on. He hesitates at the look in her eyes and the unreadable expanse of emotion there, and then, ever so slightly, brushes the back of his knuckles against her cheek. Soft and cold. She sucks in a sharp breath, as though she’s been abruptly winded—her expression tightens, brow furrowing, and she grits her teeth so hard he can see the work of muscle in her jaw. She loses whatever war she’s waging just a moment later, when something so unexpected bursts out of her that it makes his heart leap.

“I missed you, you stupid git,” she says shakily. “I missed you so much.”

“So did I,” he gets out before she lunges at him, arms wide open. He catches her and is burying his face against the crook of her neck, hidden beneath the collar of the cloak, when he feels her link her hands behind his neck and press him closer.

The heat of her washes out over him as they stay there for a while longer, and he can scarce believe this is actually reality. Perhaps he fell asleep over his work and everything’s been a cruel dream—he’ll wake up with the pattern of linen pressed into his face with the dark of the abandoned clinic all around him. The fear is sharp, but Una is realer, and if this is a dream despite that, then it is a good one. When they part they’re still touching, his hands on her arms, her fingers curled around his wrists. He can feel the impression of her rings even through her gloves.

“How did you find me?” he asks, his grasp tightening ever so slightly.

“It wasn’t easy,” she says with a sigh. “You didn’t seem to want to be found.”

He didn’t. Hadn’t. Everything’s a jumbled mess in his head now. Not much of a change from normal, he supposes. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“So am I,” Una returns, looking around with careful eyes. “I think. Is this… where you live?”

“Not much, is it?” he laughs though it feels hollow. “I didn’t really want you to see me like this.”

She lifts a hand to press against his cheek, not hesitating even when he flinches. “You look exhausted,” she murmurs, and then reaches over and yanks the glove from her hand with her teeth. She puts the back of it up against his forehead. He almost shuts his eyes at the sudden contact. “And you’re running a fever. I thought you felt a little warm.”

“It hasn’t even been an hour and you’re already mothering me,” he says, but it’s been so long since someone asked about how he’s been or taken notice of how ill he feels, day in, day out, and the sensation is so wonderful he doesn’t know how he ever stood to give it up. He’s known Hawke and her company for years now—five, next summer—and Una’s been standing here only for all but thirty minutes and she’s picked up on the fact that he’s not at his best. He wonders how much he’s changed since she last saw him. It’s not a comforting thought. He must be a shadow of the Anders she knew in Amaranthine. That man always smiled. He hasn’t done that in months.

“You need it,” she reminds him. “Maker knows what you’ve been up to on your own. I didn’t want to come after you at first, you know.”

“Oh, thanks,” he says, rolling his eyes.

“All I wanted at first was to split your skull open,” she goes on, tilting her head at him.

“I hope this is going somewhere.”

“Let me finish,” she says pointedly. “But after the anger, I realized that going back to being alone was something I was more scared of than what could possibly happen if I gave chase. So—I said my goodbyes and… I left.”

It didn’t sound very remarkable, but he knows just how much effort she expended in the endeavor of finding him just from that sentence. Una isn’t a traveler, not one who enjoys the road, and he learned as much years ago when they met. She had been loath to give up her retreat in the Wending Wood, a disheveled shack that had been practically falling in on itself when he first saw it—it had taken him weeks to get her to set up residence near the Keep, where things, he’d said, would be safer, near the Wardens, and to his lasting surprise, she’d managed to look just about as ordinary as possible. Most of the officials at the Keep were convinced she was touched in the head. They didn’t guess her anything more than a too-lonely young woman that had spent longer than advisable in the wilderness on her own.

He’d been introduced to her vicious side earlier than others, and perhaps that is why he always felt dumbfounded when people bought her act of ditzy and harmless. He’d seen her blow a man’s eyes out of his skull with the touch of one magic-heated hand, and watched her calm lack of reaction afterward. To try and tell him Una was harmless was like saying he enjoyed his time in the Circle. Unbelievable.

“I don’t deserve you,” he mumbles. The inside of his head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton. She clicks her tongue in disapproval.

“Maybe,” she concedes. “But you don’t deserve this fever, either. Do you have anything to eat?”

“I must,” Anders says with that dumb confidence again. He has no idea if there’s anything in his pantry. It likes being bare more often than not. That’s the problem with being a healer for free—much of everything you own stays empty. And ragged.

“Show me,” Una says, tugging on his hands gently. “Let’s get some food in us and then put you to bed.”

“But we have so much to talk about,” he protests.

“We can do that when you aren’t weaving like a drunken horse,” she remarks, and then catches him when he stumbles.

He sighs, leaning on her. “Point taken.”

Later he’ll find he doesn’t remember much of how they made dinner or how he found himself lying on one of the clean cots laid out for patients in the clinic, hair combed out and washed, but he will recall the sound of Una taking off her cloak and laying it over his feet to compensate for the ratty blanket.

They’d supped on bread and dried meat, some precious, secreted cheese, and broth, and he’s glad not to feel his stomach revolt when he turns on his side. She’s sitting on the cot just opposite him, now uncloaked—she’s wearing a blue tunic and a thin leather jerkin that looks like it’s seen better days, and a sweeping parted skirt that swishes around her legs when she walks to reveal thick Fereldan leggings. With her back turned to him he can see the free mass of her hair hanging down her back, stopping only short above the first curve of her waist. The ends are darkened with water and a few days’ worth of dirt, but she is still comely despite it.

She jumps a little in place when he reaches out with a tired hand to finger the golden hoop glittering underneath the hair at her right ear. The cot creaks beneath him.

“You’re still wearing it,” he says, watching her crane her head at him and smile shyly.

“I haven’t ever taken it off, if I have to be honest,” she admits, and then her expression saddens. “I’m sorry, I—”

“It’s alright,” he assures her, sliding back in place but holding her hand. Definitely better now that she’s not wearing gloves. “I don’t expect you to be happy right away, if at all. This city devours good things.”

“It’s a pisshole, you mean,” Una says. It coaxes a croaky laugh out of him. “Hightown isn’t much better than down here. It just  _looks_  cleaner. And the statues? Very encouraging.”

“Welcome to Kirkwall,” Anders rasps, threading his fingers through hers. She responds and squeezes back, making the edges of his mouth turn up in an almost-smile.

Una pulls the blanket up over his waist and pats the cloak in place. “Rest now,” she says, effectively ending any conversation. With a wave of her hand one of the torches, the closest to them, extinguishes itself with a hiss. Darkness gathers around them. His eyes shut against his will. He falls asleep grasping her hand, thinking and dreaming of better times.

—

_They’re arguing about something. Probably mages._

_That’s what they always seemed to disagree on. Education, Una would say. Control and reform and advocacy of inner strength. Freedom, Anders would retaliate. A chance to tap wells of magical possibilities that no one ever imagined. Independence! Let the Chantry burn, he’d say in the last of his years in Amaranthine, and she would look at him as though he’d lost his mind—scaring her. He never liked doing that. Those looks, more often than not, would cut the disagreements short. He’d known then that he could be too fierce, too swept up in what Justice called_ the cause _. The words hadn’t really meant anything to him before._

_But today the argument doesn’t stop, and she doesn’t frighten like she usually does. She gets in his face, eyes burning with mana, and the hairs on the back of his nape rise to stand pin-straight at the power suddenly surging into the air of the room._

_“He burned down a farmstead!”_

_He hesitates only a moment before shouting back. “You could have sheltered him!”_

_“He couldn’t even stop leaking mana,” she snaps, throwing her hands up. “I don’t have suppression powers, Anders. The boy would have killed himself or someone else if he weren’t in the company of a templar. He was a walking time bomb!”_

_He reels back, unable to process what he’s hearing. “And so you consigned him over, and to who? Guardians? Protectors?_ Teachers _? Don’t make me laugh.”_

_“I’m not trying to,” Una hisses. Her patience is fraying, he can see. “I wasn’t going to endanger the lives of every single innocent peasant under the Chantry roof just to keep my conscience relatively clear. No one mage is worth that, no matter how young.”_

_“Not even me?”_

_It slips out before he can do anything about it. She recoils like she’s been struck._

_“Not even you.”_

_Anders sucks in a deep breath, his back growing rigid. “What can I do to make you see?”_

_“My eyes are open,” she says, the anger thickening her accent. “He went willingly. He was frightened of himself. Does that mean nothing to you?”_

_He’s not going to let this go. Not so easily. “And if this same boy some years down the line decides he’s so terrified of his own power that he lets them sunder his mind—lets them turn him into a_ puppet, _would you let him? The Chantry_ teaches _us this fear. We should be proud. Proud of what we have!”_

 _“It’s his choice, not yours!” she thunders, and the chairs in the room shake with the force of her unreleased power. He’s taken aback by the volume of her voice. “We are not toys, Anders. We are not like them. We’re conduits. And terrible things happen to those who forget what happens when we stop paying attention. We will_ never _—never be common Men. I would become Tranquil twice-over before I let myself hurt anyone. Before I let myself bring more horror into this world. We have enough of it already.”_

 _“You’re beyond help,” he says. The patronizing statement draws a flinch out of her. “Go, then. If you love the bloody templars so much, go join their Circle. Watch the atrocities, helpless, and hear your friends scream and kill themselves before the breakfast bell so they can escape the humiliation of morning hymns. Know what it is to live your life in a cage with the open sky before you and your wings caught between bars. Go and_ be sodding happy _.”_

_Enraged tears rush to her eyes and she stands straight, hands pinned to her sides, fists clenched so tight her knuckles go white. “I would. I would, if I hadn’t met you. But I stayed, because I thought—it doesn’t even matter now, does it? You will drown yourself in this, Anders. And when you realize you want otherwise, it will be too late. For you… and for me.”_

_She storms out without so much as a backward glance, and when she swings the door open with enough force to make it slam against the adjacent wall, Una doesn’t even pause to see the Warden-Commander standing there in training leathers, looking like something very large and very unpleasant has just finished with bashing her over the head. The mage murmurs a hasty ‘excuse me’ and brushes past her. The Commander looks after her, pointed ears twitching, dark brows climbing high on her face, until she turns to Anders with an expression he knows all too well._

_“I, ah… didn’t do it?”_

_—_

_Making up—unusually enough—involves another argument and then a poor moment of judgment. He’s so tired of fighting that he just grasps at her wrists and pulls her closer, not forcefully, but it makes her take a step toward him. She looks at him with a clarity that unsettles him. He’s debating about leaning in when she speaks._

_“Not unless you mean it,” she says firmly. “I don’t like pity kisses.”_

_His nose brushes at her temple. Just the tip, a light graze, and then she feels the burn of his stubble on her forehead._

_“Do you believe I mean it?” he asks, and she shrugs. So he rephrases. “Do you want to believe I’d mean it?”_

_Her response is lightning-fast. “Would I be here otherwise?”_

_“Or maybe I’m just that good of a kisser,” he whispers. It works. She tries to fight the smile and fails._

_“You’re a fool is what you are,” Una tells him, but her tone is playful._

_“Good thing I’m pretty,” he says before he closes in, and all she has time for is an unclear, mumbled reply. Then she shuts her eyes and links her hand behind his neck, drawing him nearer with the lock of her wrists. The wood and braided fabric of her bracelets presses into his nape as she moves her mouth over his. She gasps when one of his hands slides up her waist._

_Definitely forgiven._

_—_

_She’s always up before him, so he never misses the chance to look at her during the few times he catches her asleep. Una has her back turned to him—she curls up into herself like a cat when she sleeps, hands tucked underneath her chin and sandwiched between her drawn-up knees. Her hair covers at least a good few centimeters of mattress and her free half of the pillow. Some of the strands are caught under her cheek, pressed between skin and pillow, fluttering with her every breath._

_Her back is covered in thin scars, with the occasional pockmark dotting it here and there, but over her right shoulder is the jagged, smoothly-healed depression of what must have once been an arrow wound. It’s something you often see on apostates, or hedge-witches—the ones that got away, anyway._

_She wakes up sometime after he starts combing through her hair with one free hand. The soft texture and silky run of it between his fingers makes him dumbly giddy. He doesn’t know why. He’s wondered about the color since the day he first saw her. He’d heard things in the Circle of hair going shock-white due to massive magical trauma, but he’d never quite believed it. What did it look like before, or during her childhood? He can’t picture her with another color of hair. The white suits her like it does very few._

_“What are you doing?” she asks sleepily, not turning around. She just stretches a little and then turns back into the blankets, huddling down till nothing below her nose is visible._

_Anders rubs a strand back and forth between the pads of his thumb and middle finger. “How did it happen?”_

_Una pauses, and considers facing him, but decides against it. She shuts her eyes. “I cast a spell that took too much out of me. I was barely sixteen.”_

_He tries imagining her, gangly, awkward and all legs, gathering magic that would… that would…_

_“It petrified me,” she says into the blankets, pressing her hands tighter together. “The power I felt after I cut myself. It was like—it was like some second skin I didn’t know I had was just_ ripped _clean off and I could_ feel _everything. I could_ do _anything.”_

_Anders becomes very still. She makes no sign of turning any time soon._

_“I killed her. I killed the woman who took my mother from me,” Una says. “I made her blood boil. It was so hot it melted the snow. I didn’t even know if it was going to work. I just grabbed—mm. When I came to, it was done. Like I’d never had dark hair in the first place. I suppose I should be grateful that’s all it took.”_

_She’s mentioned her mother before, but he hadn’t thought…_

_“Do you regret me now?”_

_He’s had to get used to candor. Una is never anything but totally honest, and she expects the same in return. Unfortunately for her, smiling and telling the truth are two things that often are mutually exclusive. In fact, it’s almost impossible to do the one with the other._

_“No,” he says after a lengthy pause. “You haven’t given me anything to regret.”_

_Her eyes stay on him, attentive. She’s so near he can see the pinpoints of yellow in her irises. “Not yet.”_

_—_

_There’s a reason Anders almost entirely gave up on stupid jokes after coming to Kirkwall. One afternoon in particular comes to mind. He’d made some offhanded remark about how to best approach roasting an opponent in armor, high heat, and, voila, templar flambé!—a rare Orlesian delicacy. She’d turned on him like a viper and struck with surprising force. He’d had her open handprint on his cheek for the rest of the day._

_“All life is precious in the eyes of the Holy Bride,” she’d said to him, voice icy calm and cool._

_And him, being the idiot he was and continues to be, had responded despite the throbbing heat on his right cheek. “I didn’t peg you for a believer.”_

_“I don’t worship,” she’d continued. “He’ll be back someday. And I want to face Him without regrets. Don’t be rash.”_

_And as she’d walked off, robes swaying, he’d asked himself several times in varying tones of force how he’d ever managed to pick her out of a crowd._

_If there is or ever was a Maker, He has the most twisted sense of humor ever known to mankind._

_—_

There’s nothing to read in the clinic but copies of what she supposes is a manifesto. She leafs through it while Anders sleeps, his breathing steady and even.

The fever has fallen, which is good, but she still wants to keep an eye on him. She’s not much for sleep anyway—the boat voyage made her jittery, and being around too many people at once is still something she’s not quite equipped to cope with. She feels like a rat here more than she ever did in Amaranthine or in the Keep.

Kirkwall is just cluster upon cluster of living spaces and slums smashed together in some haphazard mishmash with the hope it’ll resemble something orderly when the press is finished. But it’s not. It’s the farthest thing from order she’s ever seen. Even in the Alienage no one seems to know who’s going where. You stretch out one foot, expecting to land in Lowtown, but you then discover you haven’t been in Lowtown for the last fifteen minutes and that you need to hurry because you can hear people stirring behind the crumbling walls that haven’t been whitewashed since the Qunari occupation—maybe even longer.

Her mind is wandering, but she keeps skimming anyway. She recognizes Anders’ hand. It’s distinctive, not messy enough to be illegible, though not clean enough to be easily decipherable. He has the oddest way of making even handwriting feel tense. She’s seen him rip through parchment with a quill before—not that her hand is any better. She did learn to read, because her mother thought it would be important, but writing’s not something she’s done much of. The words of the writing are even more troubling. He is strained and unhappy, that she can tell by just looking at the penmanship—reading it in depth is even worse.

What has he gotten himself into?

She shuts the booklet, almost scared to read any further. Not tonight. She’ll face these demons by daylight. Una turns, ready to make room for herself on the cot—

 —and comes face to face with a very upright Anders, only it is  _not_  Anders, and the sight of the cracks of lyrium-bright blue riddling every visible part of him, she draws a breath to scream and finds she cannot even do that. He’s grabbed her by the jaw, his grip viselike, as though he doesn’t know his own strength. She’s known pain, but even Una makes a smothered noise of discomfort when she feels her teeth bite into her lip. His knuckles press into her throat. He’s holding her too tight! And that’s when she sees his eyes.

It’s like braziers have been lit behind the brown, and all that burns there now is a cold fire, as restless and unmerciful as the Fade itself. They look strange and out of place there, in his face, and the turquoise veins spread and open as he watches her, crawling over his skin like scorching webs. Even his hands—she can feel the hum of lyrium in her head, her ears, her jaw, her very bones, as though she’s standing next to a raw, unmined mass of it. The air around them is changing, turning into something more sinister and perceptible and  _tangible_. It’s as though she’s been taken to a pocket of the Fade she frequents in her sleep, but this is a nightmare, and she is very much awake.

Her hands shake, and the grip on her jaw tightens further. His nails dig into her skin.

Oh, Maker, he’s going to kill her.  _He’s going to kill her._

“If I let go…” he says, and she would have started at the sound of his voice, so changed and resonant, if his chokehold on her would let her, “…you will not cry out.”

It’s not a question or a suggestion. It’s an order. She tries to nod. Not Anders watches her, predatory eyes observant, and then releases her. She drops to the cot, coughing, trying to catch her breath, and then backs away until her spine hits the gritty wall of the clinic and she knows there’s nowhere to go. He stands now, and then comes closer still, crawling onto the second cot like more beast than man until they’re face-to-face again. She bites her lip so hard to stop herself from making any sound that she draws blood. The shock of the pain reminds her she’s still very much alive.

“Anders?” she says, sounding so tiny she has a hard time believing the question came from her.

“Yes,” the thing says, and then a frown comes over its face. “And no. I am Anders—and I am Justice. You… seem familiar.”

She almost chokes on her own spit. “ _Justice?_  Justice! Don’t you remember me?”

“Ah,” he says at last. “The apostate from Amaranthine.”

“Una,” she reminds him, as though the stating of her name will bring back all the long conversations over spirits and the Fade and the Maker back to them, back to him, and will turn him into something she remembers being fond of. “It’s Una. I—so it is true. You…”

“I am more now than I ever was, than we ever were alone,” the hybrid says to her. She can hear the echo of a thousand other voices and sounds when he speaks, as though he is talking to her through a vast and old horn fashioned to inspire fear in the hearts of men.

“Why?” she says, her curiosity winning over her good sense. “Why did neither of you tell me anything, why—?”

Justice’s lips pull back in a snarl that has her stopping cold. This is not her old friend. He is changed. They are changed. And things will never be the same again.

“You were a distraction,” he growls, sparks of white-blue jumping from his body and spiraling upward like petals of ash caught in the wind. “You were one then, and you are now. I am warning you. Do not make him stray from his path. If you do, I will kill you while he sleeps. He—I—do not need to suffer your blasphemous slander. Stand aside or be trodden under the heels of the revolution.”

She’d thought it would be at least tomorrow when she cried for a second time inside the clinic. The tears rush down, hot and wet, as though they’d never stopped.

“Anders—”

“—has nothing more to offer you. Make yourself useful and you might yet redeem yourself. But until then—I shall be watching.”

She covers her hand with a mouth to cry quietly as the possessed man slips away from her and makes his way back to the cot Anders had been sleeping in previously. He lies back down in one fluid motion, looking like he never even stirred—he even turns his head the way Anders had it lying on the pillow, and arranges the blankets correctly. The evidence of the spirit’s meticulous memory only brings a new wash of panicked sorrow over her. Its eyes are turned toward her when they shut, and then the eerie glow dies away, vein by vein, draining and fading like a depleting glowstone.

Finally it is only Anders lying there, sleeping peacefully as though he never woke up, the tousled butter-yellow of his hair spread over the threadbare pillowcase, his right arm resting on his chest. She can only stand a minute more of the breathing before she makes a concerted effort to quiet herself. He’s still sick, she reminds herself, and he needs a respite.

If sleep had been only an uncertainty before, it is now an impossibility. The light of the torch just reminds her of the creeping veins—she douses the last one with a generous damper of mana and sits in the blackness of the clinic, hugging her knees and trying to focus on the easy rhythm of his untroubled breathing. In, out, and in, and out. It’s not working. Before long the knees of her tunic are soaking, and the anxiety is too ravaging to ignore.

So for the first time in ten years since she forsook devotions, there in the darkness, Una Caraddas prays. 


End file.
